I didn’t care for the first Mamma Mia 10 years ago. I was most likely biased having seen the musical on a London West End stage which made me cringe at the over-acting, bad singing, and campy vibe of the whole adaptation. Nobody has ever seen Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again on stage; therefore - and I am as shocked as you are - I kinda/sorta enjoyed the hell out of this ridiculous, nonsensical, contrived film. Of course it’s not the story, that is naturally garbage. It’s the songs! Abba songs are so damn catchy you can’t help but chuckle at how the script forces itself to match up with the lyrics. Couldn’t escape if I wanted to, finally found my Waterloo.

Here We Go Again succeeds in spite of an avalanche of negatives. Split into two interweaving parts, there is the present day as Sophie (Amanda Seyfried, The Last Word) stages a grand re-opening of the isolated Greek island hotel founded by her mother Donna (Meryl Streep, Into the Woods). The other half of the film jumps back to 1979 to Donna’s adventure from college graduation to Greece by way of the three one night stand gentlemen we all met from the first film. One of these guys is Sophie’s biological father, but Sophie gets to play My Three Dads and lump them all together in this not so nuclear family.

Young Donna (Lily James) is the sole reason the Mamma Mia sequel squeaks above eye-rolling catastrophe into sit back and let it wash over you territory. James is knock-out spectacular. The girl can sing and the girl can dance. This dancing queen commands the screen like only a few other twenty-something actresses can. I’d seen her in bit roles every now and again but James went and stole the screen away from Ansel Elgort in Baby Driver as the sweetest waitress you’ve ever met, carried herself well in a near impossible role in The Exception as a Jewish spy in the house of Kaiser Wilhelm, and held her own in Darkest Hour up against Gary Oldman’s Academy Award winning Best Actor performance.

I feel a touch of sympathy for Amanda Seyfried. Sophie is the character who starts it all. She is the one getting married in the first film, but gets overshadowed and forgotten as Meryl Streep took over and ran away with it. Now, the audience sends a collective S.O.S. waiting until the present day scenes about hotel management this and one-liner Christine Baranski (Miss Sloane) that finish so we can get back to Lily James and her leap-frogging adventure from paramour to paramour. I’m not going to describe the three boys who are somewhat interchangeable and are built to look/act somewhat like their elders.

Regarding the elders, welcome back Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård, and Colin Firth who are back for a bit. Director Phyllida Lloyd is not back to stitch together another musical, perhaps she didn’t want to return to ‘so bad it’s good’ after helming The Iron Lady. Ol Parker, best known for writing the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies, takes over and learned the number one lesson from the first go around, do not let Pierce Brosnan carry a tune on his own. I recall folks savaged what he did to, in my opinion, Abba’s greatest song, "S.O.S." It was atrocious. Here, he sings a low-key homage to that tune, almost as an inside joke, and sings along chorus style in a couple other ditties.

Other than where the heck is Meryl Streep, a fact I will not spoil, the other juicy bit lighting up the Internet is the presence of Cher. Cher is Sophie’s grandma, but in true Hollywood fashion, Cher is only three years older than Meryl Streep in real life. Cher is only here to solidify Mamma Mia’s two ironclad rules: 1) the plot immediately preceding any song has to match the opening words almost exactly and 2) all major and even somewhat minor characters must pair off by the end of the film with a love interest. Cher delivers on both of those rules in a sort of melodic coda singing one of Abba’s best known tunes but the one most challenging to fit in. Yet her movement in the song had the theater abuzz. Is something wrong with Cher? She hardly moved and what some could consider to be dance moves were nothing more than inclines. ​

We’re not here for Cher though. Looking at the movie poster, you may think you’re here for more Meryl Streep and paternity issues, but you will soon figure out we are all here for Lily James. One of the first musical numbers is “When I Kissed the Teacher”, an absurd song and an even more absurd way Ol Parker shoehorns it into the film. But look what they do to it, going from a stuffy Oxford College auditorium to the top of a river house boat. I shouldn’t feel guilty for liking it. If you like something, then so be it - the film works - but it is so corny! Maybe I was affected by the outside world which skews how we look at any movie depending on what kind of day you're having. I saw Here We Go Again while the President of the United States decided Russia was his bestie and his intelligence agencies were mean girls. It was a weird day. And here comes this odd-looking, terribly written jolt of energy and a girl who only wants to make us smile while she sings some groovy tunes. Call me a Super Trooper then and let’s go.